The Best Places in the United States

The salted mugs for micheladas arrive frosty enough to fog, which tells you something about the priorities at this Mexican taqueria and seafood spot with a few Milwaukee locations. Shrimp comes in a chalice-sized portion, tacos al carbon carry that backyard-grill smoke, and the housemade chorizo leans hard into its smoke too. The verde salsa is the kind of thing you want to sneak home in a cup.

Porchetta ribs and bucatini all'Amatriciana anchor the menu at this Italian restaurant on Frankford Avenue, where Greg Vernick stepped outside his usual lane to cook regional Italian for the first time. The room runs buzzy and packed, the service is tight, and the wine list leans Italian by the glass. It's a genuinely sexy room to land in Kensington, and the seasonal menu follows Italian tradition closely enough to feel considered without feeling like a museum piece.

Epi's is a family-run Basque restaurant in Meridian, built on one great-grandmother's recipes and handed down through three generations without anyone apparently wanting to change them. Expect a sit-down meal of croquetas, lamb stew with green peppers, and baby squid in broth the color of printer ink. Eater lists it among Boise's essentials, and the gateau Basque at the end is how people keep the family tradition going.

Wings here get sorted by size before brining for a full day, which is the kind of attention you don't expect from a casual wing spot. The sauces are all made in-house, and several are named after regulars, so the menu doubles as a hall of fame for people who've eaten here too many times to count. If there's a wait, the dive bar next door is right there.

Falafel x Bar is a Levantine counter-service spot that doubles as a natural wine shop, so the bottle you grab off the shelf is also your dinner plan. The patio garden is big enough for a group that would rather split snacks than commit to entrees, and the tinned fish board turns up there alongside pickled things and sumac-dusted fries. Eating in gets you the toppings bar. Lunch to-go works too, but it skips the garden.

Tucked inside a working garden nursery, this fine dining room earns its farm-to-table premise rather than just decorating with it. The menu shifts with the season and the region's producers, so what lands on the table reflects what's actually ready, not what reads well on a permanent menu. Surrounded by greenery and open to the California air, the room feels more like a destination than a detour on the way to the coast.

A Mediterranean bistro tucked into the District at Prairie Trail, a walkable pocket of local shops that feels nothing like the suburban sprawl surrounding it. The kitchen leans into seafood paella, gyros, and generous sharing platters piled with falafel, house-made bread, dips, and roasted vegetables. Worth the fifteen-minute drive from downtown Des Moines, which is apparently how Ankeny earns its keep.

Foo Dog Curry Traders runs on a build-your-own formula: pick a curry, a starch, and a protein, and lunch is handled. It's mostly a takeout counter, though there are tables if you've been flipping through crates at Tiger Records or caffeinating at Bold Bean nearby. The Canada, a poutine-style heap of fries under buttery tomato curry, is a hangover remedy that never claims to be health food. Vegan popcorn chicken is also on offer.

A jewel-box bakery in Oak Park where butter croissants, Earl Grey tea cakes, and herby scones sell out before noon most days. The pantry shelves hold Guernsey dairy, local flower bouquets, and cookbooks, so it functions as a neighborhood general store for people who care deeply about breakfast. Saturdays draw a line down the block, which tells you what you need to know about the regulars' commitment levels. Go early, follow their social, and do not arrive expecting golubki if it's past noon.

A corner breakfast spot on Doyle Avenue where the menu can't decide between diner and bistro, so it lets you have both. Fluffy pancakes sit near the quiche, and the maple syrup is described, with a straight face, as "good syrup." There are potatoes in vinegar for the European mood and cubed hashbrowns for everyone else. On Fridays it quietly switches to dinner, with pasta, salads, and a short vermouth list.

The wood-burning oven was built in Naples by Stefano Ferrara and runs close to 1,000 degrees, which explains the blistered, char-edged crusts that come out of this Neapolitan pizzeria in downtown Fullerton. The mozzarella bar stocks cheese imported weekly from Caserta, so the margherita is taken rather seriously here. The dining room fills fast with locals who have clearly done this before, so plan accordingly.

Gardel is a small Argentine spot in Fox Point where the empanadas and croquetas arrive alongside a bottle of Malbec, and nobody pushes you toward the steak. Brown professors and students fill the cozy room, treating dinner as a cheap flight to Buenos Aires. They run empanada-making nights too, where you'll fold your pastry badly and the friendly staff will lie to you.

The charred pizzas come from family roots: the team behind Gather 22 also runs Byrne's Grilled Pizza, and you can taste the lineage. This all-day neighborhood cafe and bar in Fall Creek does coffee and breakfast in the mornings, then pivots to lunch and dinner with a menu that ranges from those blistered pies to a vegan Philly made with house seitan. A lounge overlooks a pet-friendly patio, and the cocktail list leans playful.

A hydroponic farm in the basement supplies the herbs and vegetables, which is either the most Old Market thing imaginable or a genuinely clever trick, depending on your mood. This comfortable, chic restaurant in Omaha's Old Market runs a produce-forward menu where the ingredients feel like the point. Ask the staff to show you the farm after dinner, because not every meal ends with a basement tour.

Three levels of Pacific views in La Jolla, each one feeling like a slightly different restaurant. George's at the Cove is a seafood institution that's been around forever, and the rooftop Ocean Terrace draws the kind of crowd that shows up before sunset and stays well past it. The menu runs toward fresh, coastal-California seafood, and the setting does a lot of the heavy lifting, which at this address is entirely fair.

A horseshoe sushi bar anchors this grotto-like den tucked beneath Dante Boccuzzi's namesake bistro on Professor Ave. Boccuzzi came up at Nobu, and the sourcing at this intimate omakase and a la carte spot reflects that pedigree without the midtown price tag. A couple of shabu-shabu tables break up the raw-fish monotony, and the sake list is long enough to require its own homework. Go hungry and leave the decision-making to the kitchen.

Brady Street's old-school Italian grocery moved across the street a few years back into a space bright enough to make you squint, but the pantry staples, the olives, and the deli counter came along for the ride. Stock up on guanciale and giardiniera, or skip straight to the sandwiches. The Human Torch, loaded with calabrese salami, capocollo, and hot pepper spread, takes its name seriously.

The Golden Ox has been in the Stockyards District forever, and it carries the beef-town energy like a badge. It's an old-school steakhouse with porterhouses that require a plan, oysters Rockefeller, and creamy cocktails like the Pink Squirrel for anyone feeling retro. The team claims the Kansas City strip originated here, which Kansas City is happy to believe. The adjoining Stockyards Brewery handles nightcaps when you want the Western aesthetic to go a little longer.

The peeling paint is part of the decor at this old-school Mexican restaurant in Walker's Point, a neighborhood that was majority Latine long before anyone called it up-and-coming. Menudo and pozole arrive steaming, mole and birria simmer all day, and the chile de arbol sauce runs a deep mahogany and takes no prisoners. Come hungry, come with a tolerance for heat, and come ready to build your own tacos from whatever the kitchen sends out.

Pinball machines, vintage hats for sale, and bags of Flossie cotton candy set the tone at this neighborhood deli, which leans hard into sandwich-shop whimsy, pun names and all. The menu takes vegetarians seriously, not as an afterthought but as an actual mission, with options built around wild mushrooms and goat cheese rather than just meat subtracted. Sandwiches with names like Shrooms over My Hammy, rosemary and all, do the arguing for the rest.

From the street, Hermosa looks like the hot dog and beef stand you grew up near, which is the joke, because inside it's a Cambodian sandwich shop with a fried chicken sandwich that has opinions. At night it quietly becomes a dinner tasting, where a group of up to 14 can take over the whole room for an 11-course BYOB spread. It's casual and counter-service, so dress for sandwiches, and bring the wine.

Locals call it "steak basement," which tells you nearly everything: it's a kinda-casual steakhouse tucked below street level in Virginia-Highland, the kind of room that hasn't tried to reinvent itself and doesn't need to. Old-school cuts arrive on heaping platters with starchy sides, and the martinis come with a sidecar so the drink stays cold. Weekend brunch pulls a crowd, but really any night works fine.

Hovan is a casual, inexpensive Mediterranean counter in Five Points, done up in blue and white, where a weekday lunch line of neighborhood office workers moves fast. Regulars get their order started the moment they walk in. When vegan requests picked up, the owners learned to make seitan from scratch for a vegan gyro, which is a level of customer service most places reserve for hostage negotiations. The catering trays turn up at everything from watch parties to funerals.

Tortillas pressed from imported blue Oaxacan corn are the foundation at this Winter Park taco shop, where the kitchen fries in beef tallow and avocado oil. The menu runs toward veal cheeks and chorizo-and-potato fillings, the kind of combinations that suggest the team grew up eating this food, not just studying it. Eater named it among Orlando's 38 best restaurants, and the regulars who show up on a Tuesday seem to already know that.

Huynh is a casual Vietnamese spot in EaDo, the kind where you order a bowl of pho roughly the size of your head and then reconsider your afternoon plans. The menu runs long, with noodle soups, vermicelli bowls, clay pot dishes, egg rolls, and crepes, and it's been a neighborhood fixture forever. Families fill the tables, prices stay friendly, and a second location is headed to Upper Kirby for the less adventurous.

Sixteen dosa configurations is the move at this South Indian casual spot inside Stoneridge Mall, where the crepes come out shatteringly crisp and the kitchen doesn't treat mall traffic as an excuse to coast. The Hyderabad bandi dosa, stuffed with chopped vegetables in a lentil-ginger sauce, arrives with a tomato chutney worth ordering extra. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the Bay Area's top South Asian restaurants, which is a lot to carry for a food court neighbor.

The wait at Il Rione works like this: put your name in, retreat to a bar nearby, and wait for your phone to buzz. It's a New York-style pizzeria in Detroit Shoreway, and the room is that particular mix of scuffed and stylish that only works when the food earns it. The menu is short by design, built around pies, with a handful of salads and boards rounding things out. Beer, wine, and cocktails keep the same focused logic.

The snack-sized tacos here get deep-fried and coated in an aggressive orange cheese dust that looks exactly like what it is, and Kansas City has been arguing about whether that's genius or not since 1957. This old-school fast food counter does its own riff on the KC taco, served with hot sauce for dunking, plus a Pocket Burger that improves on the loose meat sandwich format by being noticeably juicier. A local institution that polarizes, never bores.

The wooden door on King Street opens into a narrow, warm room that's been packed most nights for as long as anyone can remember. Indaco is a wood-fired pizza and pasta spot where the wine list leans affordable Italian and people tend to order a second bottle before they've finished the first. The leopard-spotted crust on the nduja pizza is the obvious draw, but the seasonal pasta earns its place on the table too.

The menu roams from South Indian chicken 65 to Indo-Chinese noodles to biryani without feeling like it's hedging its bets, which is a harder trick than it sounds. This casual Indian restaurant in a strip mall along El Camino earned a San Francisco Chronicle nod for South Asian dining in the Bay Area. The Vijayawada biryani, where the rice simmers in a tomato-onion gravy until each grain is loaded, is the kind of dish that makes the drive feel incidental.

The pastry chef doubles as a chocolatier, which is either a warning to pace yourself or a reason to skip straight to dessert. This East Cesar Chavez neighborhood Italian spot runs on local farms and whole-animal cooking, so the menu shifts with the season. Pastas and anything with duck tend to anchor whatever's on offer. Before you leave, at least pick up some of the handmade chocolates at the counter.

Irregardless Biscuit is a tiny Southern breakfast counter in a building with roughly four tables, which is why the line tends to wander out onto Carpenter Street. The biscuits are big and fluffy, the sandwiches ride on them, and the chicory iced coffee does the heavy lifting on a hot morning. The candied bacon one is named for the previous tenant, a hole-in-the-wall breakfast spot, so getting yours to go doubles as a small memorial.

The kitchen counter of this Japanese rowhouse izakaya seats you close enough to watch the grillwork happen in real time. The menu runs to sashimi, grilled collars, and hand-doodled specials that change on a whim, sake descriptions written for humans rather than sommeliers, and on Tuesday nights the upstairs flips into a natural-wine bar that hospitality workers seem to have claimed as their unofficial break room.